Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices can include several types of devices including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and easy portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. A touch screen input/output device is particularly useful on such handheld devices as such handheld devices are small and are therefore limited in space available for user input and output devices. Further, the screen content on the touch screen devices can be modified depending on the functions and operations being performed.
Touch screen devices include a display, such as a liquid crystal display, with a touch-sensitive overlay exposed for input and output. These touch screen devices suffer from inherent disadvantages relating to user interaction and response, however. For example, such touch screen devices fail to provide user-desirable tactile feedback for positively indicating input. Poor or no tactile feedback causes difficulty in discerning whether or not an intended input has been received and can result in receipt of erroneous input at the device, for example, by additional or double input. Electronic devices with a moveable touch screen display relative to a base of the device can provide tactile feedback to user. These devices are intended to provide tactile feedback in response to a force applied to the touch screen display. Further improvements for tactile feedback and control of such feedback are desirable, however.